Youthquake

Mumblecore movies.

You’re about twenty-five years old, and you’re no more than, shall we say, intermittently employed, so you spend a great deal of time talking with friends about trivial things or about love affairs that ended or never quite happened; and sometimes, if you’re lucky, you fall into bed, or almost fall into bed and just enjoy the flirtation, with someone in the group. This chatty sitting around, with sex occasionally added, is not the sole subject of “mumblecore,” a recent genre of micro-budget independent movies, but it’s a dominant one. Mumblecore movies are made by buddies, casual and serious lovers, and networks of friends, and they’re about college-educated men and women who aren’t driven by ideas or by passions or even by a desire to make their way in the world. Neither rebels nor bohemians, they remain stuck in a limbo of semi-genteel, moderately hip poverty, though some of the films end with a lurch into the working world. The actors (almost always nonprofessionals) rarely say what they mean; a lot of the time, they don’t know what they mean. The movies tell stories but they’re also a kind of lyrical documentary of American stasis and inarticulateness. The first mumblecore film, by general agreement, was Andrew Bujalski’s 2002 “Funny Ha Ha,” a sweet-natured account of a young woman’s post-college blues. But the style wasn’t named until 2005, when the sound mixer Eric Masunaga, having a drink at a bar during the South by Southwest Film Festival (SXSW), in Austin, used the term to describe an independent film he had worked on. The sobriquet stuck, even though the filmmakers dislike it. In the films I’ve seen, however, the sound is quite clear. It’s the emotions that mumble.

Apart from the yearly festival in Austin, where many of the movies are first shown, the movement has never developed a geographical center. The directors live in Chicago, Boston, Portland, Brooklyn. What makes them part of a movement is the technology they use and the paucity of their funds, which, together, help create a subject matter and an aesthetic. A typical low-budget independent film with professional actors and a good cinematographer may cost upward of two or three million dollars. The budget for a mumblecore movie may be as low as fifteen hundred dollars. The films are usually shot with a digital camera, in somebody’s apartment, and run about eighty minutes. The filmmaking ensemble gathers around a writer-director-editor figure; they act in the movie, add ideas or lines of dialogue, write music, play or sing onscreen. Few people get paid much, if they get paid at all. Youth is the subject of mumblecore and also the condition of its existence. But these sociable movies exist at a lower level of intensity than comparable youth-loving movies of the past. The young people in the quickly made Godard movies of the sixties dreamed of becoming gangsters, thieves, revolutionaries—characters, so to speak, in a movie. The studs and the female “superstars” of the Warhol films played at Hollywood glamour while enacting the ceremonies of decadence and self-destruction. Mumblecore disdains flamboyance; its reigning mood is diffidence.

The critic Amy Taubin, in Film Comment, once referred to the director Andrew Bujalski—now thirty-one, and perhaps the most fluent and talented of the group—as “a poet of demurral, hesitation, and noncommitment.” In Bujalski’s engaging “Mutual Appreciation” (2005), there’s a potentially dangerous conversation on the edge of a bed between a young musician, Alan (Justin Rice), and Ellie (Rachel Clift), the girlfriend of Alan’s longtime best friend. Ellie hints that she’s attracted to Alan, a sweet, rather hapless guy with an enchanting smile, then retracts what she started to say, and apologizes. Alan reassures her that it’s cool, it’s all right, no problem. So she tries, haltingly, to say it again. Starting and stopping, she’s like a puppy shyly nosing a toy into a room and looking up to see who’s watching. The scene is a comic duet for two affably passive-aggressive people, each of whom wants the other to take responsibility for anything that might happen. In conventional terms, nothing does happen. For Bujalski, however, the passing desire, the impulse not acted on, is a major dramatic event, and a good part of the rest of the movie is devoted to discussing this ineffable conversation. The edge-of-the-bed scene is partly improvised, which gives the hesitations and silences a tone of exquisite embarrassment. The moment plays like Cassavetes, without the high-pressure acting.

Some critics have deplored mumblecore movies as smug portraits of a new generation of privileged white slackers. But a critic, I think, should grant a filmmaker his subject. When the material is emotionally raw, and the nonprofessional actors show some strength, mumblecore delivers insights that Hollywood can’t come close to. Aaron Katz’s “Dance Party, USA” (2006) has a sequence that may be the most moving and effective in the modest mumblecore canon: a good-looking seventeen-year-old boy (Cole Pensinger), who is rapidly becoming a lout, confesses to an aimless young woman who interests him that he once raped a drunken fourteen-year-old girl. The confession moves forward, but with innumerable pauses. The boy enjoys boasting of his ruthlessness, yet he also feels ashamed; the woman’s silence goads him, finally, into completing the confession, which for him becomes an act of purgation. The movie tracks his gradual passage from smarmy adolescence to something like decency.

The characters in mumblecore may lack ambition, but the directors are clear enough in their desire to make full-length movies. Bujalski, the director in the group whose work most resembles European art films (he even shoots on film), has made three features since 2002; the earnest and lyrical Aaron Katz has made five films of one sort or another in the past four years; and Joe Swanberg, the most sexually explicit of the directors, who sometimes appears in mumblecore movies sporting a tuft of devilish red beard, has made six features and three shorts in five years. This kind of busy-beaver, spontaneous activity is, of course, a de-facto rebuke to Hollywood’s elephantine methods and inane formulas—the snippy-snappy Kate Hudson comedies, the digital-action films that whirl into nowhere. Is there a revolution brewing, a rattling of the gates? One might like to fantasize about mumblecore and other independent directors taking over the studios and junking all the dumb projects, but no such thing will happen. Theatrical attendance for commercial movies is on the rise; the executives are not about to abandon their movies or their methods. At the same time, the theatrical distribution of small movies has become commercially hazardous—the land of high ideals and broken hearts—and many young filmmakers are looking to shake up distribution patterns. Some of them hawk their movies themselves, selling DVDs on the Internet. (You can buy Bujalski, Swanberg, and Katz movies that way.) But a larger audience can probably be built in the future through video on demand or by direct Internet download. For instance, “Alexander the Last,” the most recent picture written and directed by the prolific Swanberg, will be shown at the SXSW festival in Austin, on March 14th, and made available the same day as a video on demand.

It turns out that Swanberg, now twenty-seven, is changing his game. In his earlier movies, there was usually a project of sorts going on amid the sexual encounters—a set of taped interviews with people whose love affairs had gone bad in “Kissing on the Mouth” (2005); an audio montage of people making funny noises which a musician assembles into a rhythmically charged composition in “LOL” (2006). In “Alexander the Last,” the project is a local theatre production. A married actress (Jess Weixler) attracted to a good-looking actor she’s working with contemplates an affair with him, only to discover that her sister, with whom she’s very close, is already sleeping with him. The story, in its formal symmetries, suggests one of Éric Rohmer’s narratives of advance and retreat in “Six Moral Tales.” In the past, people in Swanberg’s movies slept with one another without much consequence—the plots were not fully worked out, and many implications, not to mention relationships, were left hanging. The slapdash style of storytelling was part of Swanberg’s cool contempt for mainstream filmmaking. But in “Alexander the Last” he’s advancing toward a firmer structure and more emotionally explicit scenes. He has a producer this time, and sets, or at least a theatre, and he uses trained actors, who work up an emotion much more clearly than the earlier casts of amateurs did, though without the surprises. In brief, Swanberg is giving up some of the methods of mumblecore.

It remains to be seen, in fact, whether mumblecore’s ethos can survive in a period of violent economic downturn. Those penny-budget movies were made in a time of prosperity. Now that the parental check or the roommate’s job may be drying up, the movies could dry up, too, or turn from dithering to rage. Of course, fresh young directors, willing to work cheaply, will emerge. But will they mumble if their bellies are beginning to growl? The new distribution channels may be the key to keeping this low-key but cheering movement alive. ♦

David Denby has been a staff writer and film critic at The New Yorker since 1998.